The economy’s weakness has two symptoms: The persisting high unemploymentrate and – what’s even worse – the looming federal debt disaster.

It’s true that the economic recession didn’t begin under President Obama’s watch, but he’s made it worse. So much worse that it’s doubtful it can be “solved” in the short run.

Consider the infamous stimulus, the largest glob ofpork in history. Obama and his senior economists promised that unemployment would never exceed 8 percent and they projected that today it would be 6.8 percent. Today it is hovering over 9 percent.

Obama signed the stimulus into law in February 2009, and since then, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employed people declined by nearly 2 million. Now the stimulus supporters say that, aha, if we did not pass it the number of job losses would be much larger – a convenientexcuse. The ill-fated stimulus was concocted because either the Obama’s economists did not know good Friedmanian macro economics, or – more likely – Obama ignored them and allowed his ideological left to determine his fiscal policy. All his top economic advisers resigned.

Republican independents and tea partiers must explain to American voters that fighting against the recession must begin with a commitment not to repeal the Bush tax cut, wholly or partially. Also, promise to cut our corporate tax, which is the second-highest in the world, to 15 percent to 25 percent. In ourmodern economic history, three times tax cuts vigorously stimulated the economy– Johnson 1964; Reagan 1981 and Bush 2003. Had Obama’s team, instead of the stimulus, cut the corporate tax and committed not to repeal the Bush tax cut,the economy would have been in much better shape today.

The Republicans must also pledge to eliminate many of the intrusive rules and regulations, e.g. the new excessive financial regulations, EPA overreaching, ObamaCare and so on.

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This would put an end to the uncertainty that inhibits firms from investing andhiring.

A fiscal apocalypse is looming. Because of the huge stimulus and other recent reckless spending, as shown by the Congressional Budget Office, the federal deficit increased from 3.2 percent in fiscal 2008 to 8.9 percent of GDP in 2010. Consequently, in 2011 the national debt will reach the unprecedented 70 percent of GDP. In 2008 it was only 40.2 percent. To forecast the future, the CBO must continuously issue the “extended base-line scenario” which, for example, assumes that payments to Medicare physicians will decline by a third. This is a bad joke. According to the serious “alternative scenario” of the CBO, by 2021 the national debt will reach an unsustainable level of 100 percent of GDP.

This means that servicing the national debt would gobble a quarter of the federal budget, thus threatening the viability of many federal programs, not the least of which, the various military branches.

Republican candidates can easily convince voters that the economy is bad, but they must also reveal a plausible cure. That would be difficult to do, but let us try. Obama and his followers want to raise taxes to plug the deficit. The three historic tax cuts mentioned above not only accelerated economic growth and employment, but also reduced the deficit simply because the effect of fast-growing output easily overcame the reduction of tax collected per dollar of GDP.

Raising tax rates would have the opposite effect. If the Democrats truly want a compromise they should take a clue from Bill Clinton and swap elimination of many corporate loopholes for a corporate tax cut.

It does not take a rocket engineer to look at the budget data and realize that solving the fiscal problem would take a structural change of the entitlements. In the future, when Congress is cured of its paralysis, it should raise the Medicare eligibility age and sync it with Social Security’s scheme. Finally, Congress should repeal ObamaCare but pass a new optimistic health-care law that would switch Medicaid to block grants to the states and adopt some of the best parts of Paul Ryan’s proposal for Medicare.

Before long, voters will start to understand the economic mess that we face. Democrats will try to run away from the issues and depend on their traditional supporters plus more than $1 billion in campaign funds. Many Republicans, when asked which candidate they support, say “whoever can win.” To win, however, the Republican candidate must be able to clearly articulate to voters why taxes cannot be raised, excessive regulations must be abolished, entitlements must be structurally changed and ObamaCare replaced. Unless the chosen Republican leader is capable of doing all that, the worry is that when the voters find out just how bad it is, and what draconian measures have to be taken, they will collectively gulp and take another chance on Obama’s happy hooey.

Micha Gisser is a professor emeritus of economics at UNM, and Kenneth Brown is a retired senior executive with the National Science Foundation.

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“Experience is a hard master but only fools will have no other,” counseled Ben Franklin. Unfortunately, these dire days the fools won’t even defer to experience.

The Great Recession isn’t about what we’ve learned. It’s about what we’ve unlearned.

Hard times reveal soft heads. Conmen prey on despair by offering hope. The people most desperate for a cure buy the snake oil. Later, they realize they’ve been had.

We lose our minds only after we’ve lost much else.

During the boom, the crank dodges tomatoes and the long hook from stage right. During the bust, the crank basks in the limelight and the crowd’s applause. The reversal of fortune that turns the economy upside down also turns economics upside down. What flunked Econ 101 yesterday aces it today.

Consider the bipartisan stupidity that now governs the government:

When in Debt, Double Down on Debt

Rash is the new prudent. The debt-limit debate, in which the establishment perversely insists that denying trillions in new borrowing will inflame the debt crisis, underscores this bassackwards thinking. Caution requires that we take on trillions in new debt. Recklessness stands athwart more borrowing. Never has incontinence been so effectively sold as moderation.

Government Should Further Shrink a Shrinking Economy

“You don’t raise taxes in a recession,” the president assured an Elkhart, Indiana audience two years ago. “We haven’t raised taxes in a recession.” That’s what he said.What did he do? He signed the greatest tobacco tribute in history. He invented health-care levies that grabbed billions in the strangely named Affordable Care Act. He tried to raise the top marginal income-tax rate last December. And in the debt-limit discussions, he demands—Guess what?—$1 trillion in tax hikes. No matter the question, Obama’s answer is consistent: raise taxes.

Moral Hazard’s Immorality

“I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system,” George W. Bush uttered in his presidency’s waning days. The last president’s senseless quip makes sense as an epitaph for a senseless era. The government bailout to socialize the losses of careless financiers incentivized recklessness. The beauty of the free market is that it encourages productivity through profit and discourages failure through loss. The profit motive is more effective, if less well intentioned, than any do-gooder program. But this is an age that values benign motives over idiotic results.

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They promised a stimulant. It was really a sedative. And it wasn’t until the whole country woke up naked, bleeding, and missing $787 billion that we had all realized that the stimulus the Democrats had slipped us was really a roofie. The stimulus failed because it merely shifted around existing dollars. Robbers redistribute wealth. They don’t create it. Ditto for politicians. Beware of robbers, elected and unelected, slipping you a Mickey.

Don’t Call Us Robber Barons

When the state subsidized railroads and oil companies, newspapermen quickly cried “crony capitalism” and “robber barons.” But phrases like “clean energy” and “green jobs” confuse journalists the way “these are not the droids you are looking for” mindtrick stormtroopers. The president has repeatedly demanded government “investment” in the private sector. The media never question why actual investors—you know, the ones who make millions betting their own lucre on ventures—balk at pouring money into the giant pinwheels, overpriced electric soap-box cars, and ghost-town wi-fi in which Obama invests your money. Products that can only succeed through subsidies to producers and compulsion of consumers generally don’t win the enthusiasm of investors. Worse still, the deepening government troth perverts the entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of pleasing the marketplace millions, we seek to please a few bureaucrats.

Barack Obama insisting that responsibility necessitates borrowing trillion more, the Great Recession has spread not-so-great ideas into the brains of the highbrains. These years rank with the 1970s, 1930s, and 1890s for tough times and weak ideas. Never has the staid establishment sounded more like a nuthouse.

When our wallets recess, our minds do too.

The Great Recession has made us poor. Worse still, it’s made us stupid.

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Daniel J. Flynn is a columnist for HUMAN EVENTS and the author of numerous books, including A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008), Intellectual Morons (Crown Forum, 2004), and Why the Left Hates America (Prima Forum, 2002).

Labor Day finds New York Democrats fear ing that President Obama’s sinking approval ratings will cost them ex-US Rep. Anthony Weiner’s seat next week, plus several congressional seats and the recapture of the state Senate next year, senior party officials privately concede.

“The fear is that with a Republican [Robert Turner] being so close for the Weiner seat, which is in a traditionally safe Democratic district, that Democratic marginals [in hard-fought districts] like Maurice Hinchey, Paul Tonko and Louise Slaughter, will be in trouble next year,” a top Democratic said yesterday, referring to three upstate Congress members.

Obama’s polling numbers have dropped to their lowest point ever in heavily Democratic New York as the economy has slowed, unemployment his risen, and controversy has swirled over the president’s policy toward Israel, which has weakened his standing with Jewish voters, several recent polls show.

“Democrats have a problem,” said longtime Democratic consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

“The president’s falling numbers can mean limited intensity of [Democratic] turnout; goodbye, state Senate hopes; hello, more Jews; and whites fleeing the Democratic Party again, much like they did in the late 1960s,” he said.

Retail and Wholesale Workers Union President Stuart Appelbaum warned, “Obama needs to remember that the last two elections were about jobs, not the size of the debt, or else Democrats throughout New York may bear the consequences.”

And a prominent party official added, “We’re getting to a point where a lot of Democrats are not going to want to be associated with the president.”

A recent Siena College poll found that nearly two-thirds of New York voters saying Obama is doing only a fair or poor job, while they were nearly evenly divided on whether he deserved reelection.

Even more ominous for Obama was the racial breakdown, with 55 percent of white voters having an unfavorable opinion of the president, and just 42 percent favorable. And traditionally Democratic Jewish voters barely favored Obama, by a statistically insignificant 49 to 48 percent.

A second Siena survey found Democratic Assemblyman David Weprin with a narrow 48-42 percent lead over GOP businessman Robert Turner in the Sept. 13 special election contest for Weiner’s Brooklyn/Queens district, which has turned into a referendum on Obama.

Turner’s campaign claimed the race was even closer, releasing a McLaughlin & Associates poll late last week showing a 42-42 percent tie.

“If the president’s numbers do not improve, Democrats will face a very difficult task winning hotly contested legislative and congressional seats,” said Siena pollster Steve Greenberg.

In a related development, Senate Democrats are having troubling recruiting a candidate to challenge Sen. Jack Martins, a Nassau County freshman who has been regarded as a prime candidate for defeat next year.

“Obama’s presence isn’t helping,” said a Democratic insider, noting that a large number of Jewish voters live in the district."

PHOENIX (AP) — Ten Arizona sheriffs slammed the Obama administration on Friday over a botched federal operation that allowed more than 2,000 high-powered rifles to make their way to Mexico, calling for the president to launchh an independent investigation and for Attorney General Eric Holder to step down or be fired.

Speaking at the state capitol in Phoenix, the sheriffs called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ 2009 operation, known as “Fast and Furious,” a betrayal of state law enforcement.

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu (BAB’-yew) said it’s not a partisan issue, noting that the sheriffs joining him were Democrats and Republicans.

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He says it’s a public safety issue, and that the guns allowed into Mexico have been linked to dozens of crime scenes on both sides of the border.

Lest we forget at least and over-the shoulder acknowledegment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins- or which is which), the first radical knwon to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it

so effectivelly that he at least won his own kingdom -Lucifer

Obama studied and has used the soul less tactics of Saul Alinsky to destroy political enemies. They are currently using the Alinsky tactic of ridicule to destroy Republican candidates as well as alienate and marginalize conservative black Americans.

The Alinksy radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots. What this amounts to in practice is a political nihilism – a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people” (who, in the fashion common to dictators, are designated as such by the revolutionary elite).~ David Horowitz

It is impossible to properly understand President Obama and what animates his treasonous policies unless one properly understands those who taught him, inspired him and the tactics he has adopted to contemporary Democratic Party politics with singular efficiency and fanaticism, including: Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Lenin, Al Capone, Alinsky and Castro, among many other villains of history. In today’s column, I will focus on the nihilist ideas of Saul Alinsky of whom a Students for a Democratic Society radical wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.” In other words, systematically lie in the short term to achieve your long-term revolutionary goals of societal deconstruction.

Horowitz wrote that Alinsky devoted “his entire life to organizing a revolution in America to destroy a system he regarded as oppressive and unjust.” Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are protégées of Alinsky. When Obama said on election eve 2008, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America,” he wanted to bring Alinsky’s nihilist nightmare to the heart of America. Every appointee, every policy, every executive order, every bill he presents to Congress has the singular goal of enslaving people to government, establishing the Democratic Party for eternity by destroying God, American exceptionalism, freedom and all opposition.

The moment you believe or give credence to anything Obama (or any communist, progressive socialist, for that matter) says, you have fallen into his trap, lost the argument and are now an unwitting participant in helping him achieve his evil goals of burning to the ground all of America’s civil institutions by bankrupting the people – both in a metaphorical and actual sense.

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In his 1971 book, “Rules for Radicals,” Alinsky says in RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. By “polarize” Alinsky means to “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)” Therefore, the only way to achieve Alinsky’s anti-American goals is to lie about everything you stand for. That’s why he dedicated his book to Lucifer (Satan) whom the Bible says “is a liar and the father of lies.”

Dutifully following the Alinsky model of chaos-anarchy-nihilism and psychological projection (assigning your true evil motives to your enemies), Obama’s policies have purposely exacerbated our economic crisis to Great Depression levels and has started America toward a Marxist, European-sstyle health-care system.In Obama’s nearly three years in office, America’s national poverty has reached record levels (46.2 million), and America’s GDP and economic growth are at anemic or negative levels. This alone has already made his presidency one of the most polarizing in history.

I challenge anyone to search the archives of American chief executives from George Washington to George W. Bush, and I guarantee you that there is no other president so incompetent, arrogant, a hater of his own country and a pathological liar than Barack Hussein Obama. Obama actually derives a perverse sense of pleasure in America’s suffering. The more America suffers the better Obama and his Alinsky disciples feel.

David Horowitz wrote that, coming of age in the 1930s, Alinsky was drawn to the world of Chicago gangsters like a moth to the flame and, in his professional capacity as a sociologist, on repeated occasions socialized with them. He became a willing public acquaintance of Frank Nitti, the infamous mob enforcer of Al Capone who succeeded as boss when Capone was eventually sent to Alcatraz federal prison for tax evasion charges in 1931. Recalling those times with fondness, Alinsky would later write, “[Nitti] took me under his wing. I called him the Professor, and I became his student.”

Like Hobbes, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Robespierre and Lenin before him, Alinsky would deify the brutish, wicked and primitive members of society while impugning the virtuous, remarkable and law-abiding. Alinsky’s associations with murderous mafia thugs did not mean he was unaware of the facts that criminals were dangerous, but like his intellectual forefathers before him, following the zeitgeist of the progressive revolution and being a doctrinaire leftist, he held “society,” America and capitalism solely responsible for existential class inequities. In Alinsky’s view, which the Democratic Party follows to this day, criminality was not a character problem but a consequence of the social environment, in particular the structure of private property and individual rights, which radicals like him were determined to change.

Truth was not only relative to Alinsky, it was irrelevant. Alinsky wrote, “An organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth – truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. ... To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations.”

It was Nietzsche who coined the ideas “God is dead” and “will to power.” Once you remove God from politics, law, culture and society, all you need is a charismatic radical leader to fill the void, to impose his will on the people, to be so fanatically devoted to an overarching, controlling idea – the STATE is god and has all the answers to society’s problems (as in the case of every Democrat from Woodrow Wilson to Obama) – that all other issues pale in comparison.

That’s what Obama’s current $650 billion job’s bill together with his multi-state promotional tour is all about – it’s all lies, lies and damn lies concocted to deceive those whom Lenin called “useful idiots.”

Capp donated $500 to to Obama's 2008 campaign, as well as $500 to Martha Coakley and $250 to congresswoman Niki Tsongas in 2009. Coakley lost against Scott Brown in the 2009 special election to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy, and Tsongas was running for reelection to the House in 2010. Beacon Power is based in Tyngsboro, a town 44 miles northwest of Boston that is located in Tsongas's Fifth Congressional District.

Other Beacon Power employees made similar contributions. Matthew Polimeno, the company's director of government relations, donated $500 to Tsongas in 2008 and another $250 in 2009, while also donating $250 to Coakley in 2009. Beacon Power CFO James Spiezio donated $250 to Coakley in 2009.

The company's connection with Democrats does not end there. One of Beacon Power's chief federal lobbyists was Steve A. Wolfe of Cardinal Point Partners. Wolfe is a former aide to Senator Edward Kennedy, a close ally to Obama in the Senate and the man Martha Coakley was seeking to replace in the U.S. Senate.

The loan guarantee program is the same that provided $535 million in a loan guarantee to failed solar power company Solyndra.

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Holder Refuses To Apologize For Murder Of Border Agent; Says Fast & Furious Didn’t Lead To Death

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Attorney General Eric Holder tells Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) that he has not apologized to the family of Brian Terry, the U.S. Border Patrol agent murdered by a weapon used in the Fast & Furious operation now being investigated. When given the opportunity to do so at today’s Senate hearing he would not apologize.

Holder also says that Fast & Furious did not directly lead to the death of Agent Brian Terry. “It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in Fast & Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry,” Holder said today.

Sen. John Cornyn: “Have you apologized to the family of Brian Terry?”

Attorney General Eric Holder: “I have not apologized to them, but I certainly regret what happened.”

Cornyn: “Have you even talked to them?”

Holder: “I have not.”

Cornyn: “Would you like to apologize today for this program that went so wrong that took the life of a United States law enforcement agent?”

Holder: “I certainly regret what happened to Agent Brian Terry. I can only imagine the pain that his family has had to deal with, in particular his mother. I am a father of three children myself. We are not programmed to bury our kids. It pains me whenever there is a death of a law enforcement official, especially under the circumstances that this occurred. It is not fair, however, to assume that the mistakes that happened in Fast & Furious directly led to the death of Agent Terry. Again my feelings of sympathy and regret go out to the Terry family and I hope that the steps that we have put in place, the measures that I have called for will prevent other federal agents, local, state agents from being the subject of this kind of violence as well as civilians, both in the United States and in Mexico.”

Arrest Holder, force him to resign, block 0bama from granting him a pardon. Then ship Holder to Mexico so they can begin legal action against him, under Mexico laws.